Another book that Dave has written is, “FPGAs?! Now What?” It’s a great primer into getting started.

More recently, Dave has been playing around with MyHDL, which uses Python to abstract out more of the design. This is in place of VHDL or Verilog. Dave wants to build a training course with Python Notebooks.

To be a good designer, you really still need to know the hardware and how your code will generate. This also helps portability because you aren’t using vendor specific macros.

Thanks again to Dave for stopping by and talking FPGAs with us. He has tons of great experience and makes a great product. You can find him on Twitter @devbisme, where he has been a member since the 555 contest! Or check out the XESS website for more info about tutorials and hardware.

You can use my XESS SDRAM controller. It’s open source. There are probably others on opencores.org.

The problem with the XSA-100 is it’s using the Spartan-2 FPGA. The newer versions of the free Xilinx WebPACK tools stopped supporting that device, so you’d have to install an earlier version. In addition, you’re using an older FPGA with no built-in multipliers, smaller block RAMs, fewer gates. It gets to the point (IMO) where it’s not worth your time to reclaim older electronics versus just moving to the newer stuff. Although, like many, I don’t like throwing stuff away.

Don’t get too dependent on those costing ULPs. I have to scrape the Digikey pages to get the pricing information (Digikey wouldn’t give me access to their web database API) and they sometimes change the call to their search engine which breaks the whole ULP.

The problem I had with Octopart is they want money if you make over 500 queries a month (as I recall). On a board with 50 distinct components, that means you can only do ten cost assessments. (I don’t have a problem with people making money except when it’s my money.)